The Cruiser (19 page)

Dan almost smiled. But not quite. Then he was out of there, mind snapping to the next item on the day's agenda.

*   *   *

THEY
assembled in his in-port stateroom. Longley had coffee and doughnuts ready and Dan gestured everyone—Noblos and Wenck and Mills, Singhe and Terranova and Staurulakis, the major players in his Aegis team—to seats. Dr. Noblos looked worn and held a handkerchief to his nose; he sniffled. Terranova smiled down at the table with that inwardness, that passivity, he'd noted before, and grabbed for a doughnut. Wenck was humming to himself, some inaudible ditty that bounced his head back and forth as he plugged in a power supply and set up a notebook. Not for the first time, Dan wondered if there might be a touch of autism, Asperger's or something like that, there. Mills blinked into space. He'd just come off watch and looked as if his head were still in Combat. Staurulakis sat pale, calm, composed, compact, ready for anything. While Singhe, perfectly pressed, perfectly coiffed, smiled at him, deep brown eyes seeming to convey more than any whisper could. Sandalwood perfume drifted across the table. The strike officer wasn't really part of the TBMD team. But maybe the more brainpower they poured on this, the better.

He cleared his throat. “All right, I asked everyone here to iron out any hard spots now that the watch is set in ABM mode. I guess I'll ask Chief Wenck … or, maybe better, Dr. Noblos to start the recap.”

The physicist coughed. He said in a hoarse voice, “I assume you're calling this to check our timelines and geometry?”

“Maybe start with an overview, Doctor.”

Noblos smiled tightly. “I'll make it as … simple as I can, then.

“
Savo Island
's mission is to maintain station once hostilities begin, in surveillance and track mode, ready to intercept any ballistic missile fired within a radius of three hundred miles. The obvious enemy is Iraq, the extended-range Scud they call the Al-Husayn, though Iran's also on the threat axis and within range. If the firing point is from western Iraq, we'll have a near zero angle of attack on the incoming missile from here.

“We'll probably acquire either via handoff from AWACS or cuing from Obsidian Glint. Aegis will develop a track, compute intercept trajectory, and initialize. We have a limited inventory. Four Block 4A Theater Defense rounds. The missile will perform a built-in system test, match parameters, and fire itself. This must occur no later than eight minutes after the target launch.”

The scientist coughed. “After firing and in flight, the SM-2 establishes communication with the ship. The booster will burn out, and separate. The solid-fuel dual-thrust motor will ignite. Aegis keeps transmitting midcourse guidance through the third-stage motor burn, taking the warhead above the atmosphere. The kill vehicle will apogee three hundred twenty-five kilometers up at approximately fifteen thousand miles an hour. Terminal long-wave infrared guidance will take it to final impact.

“If, that is, all goes as planned.” Noblos blinked bloodshot orbs at the overhead. “Limiting factors are the low round loadout, marginal crew training, marginal software function, and limited backup amplifier and power-out equipment. I have to be honest. The best possible outcome would be if we never have to fire. Because I don't think you're ready to detect, track, and discriminate well enough to achieve mission success.”

Dan said as evenly as he could, “Thanks for the recap, Doctor, and for keeping it … comprehensible. Matt, what can you add?”

Mills spoke through his hands, which were clamped over his face. “Well, Dr. Noblos has pointed out most of the hard spots. But the cooling system and the calibration are question marks too. I have more confidence in Donnie and the Terror's tracking team than the Doc seems to. But the geometry's going to govern everything, and it's the one variable we can maybe get some more traction on. So I printed this out.”

He passed out pages, and Dan studied his copy. A map of the Levantine, with a blurry infinity or sideways figure-eight pattern overlaid between the east Med and western Iraq. The left lobe of the lazy eight was much smaller than the right.

Mills said, “Over here to the left is our assigned box. You can see we have a pretty small footprint to jockey around in. We're going to have to watch the intel very closely. If we get launch indications farther south in Iraq”—he rocked his fingers in a seesaw—“we'll want to move north. And vice versa. The more we can minimize the sideways velocity vectors, the bigger the error basket we give ourselves.”

“Bigger, or smaller?” Dan asked. “I'm not sure I—”

Staurulakis said, “Think of it as a funnel, Skipper. The narrow end's what we have to get the missile into. That's the error basket. The kill vehicle has its own little steering thrusters, once the infrared seeker locks on. That's the open end of the funnel. But there's only a limited amount of maneuverability after burnout.”

Mills added, “Don't forget, it's going two miles a second by then. We have to get our bird into that funnel, as Cheryl calls it, so the seeker can track and discriminate for a hit-to-kill. The closer to a nose-on meeting we can manage, the bigger that basket will be, and the better chance we'll hit it.”

Dan said, “Okay, let's assume we hit the, uh, the error basket. What's P-sub-K after that? Probability of kill?”

Noblos took that one. “For the warhead itself, if it gets out there and is positioned right, and the target's within its maneuverability envelope, P-sub-K will be around .8. Or so. But that's to impact. Actual P
K
on an incoming warhead also depends on what kind of target we get, unitary or separating. If the airframe detaches from the warhead, for example, as reentry starts, you get two targets and possibly other debris as well. There's some discrimination built into the seeker, but it's not foolproof.”

“Overall?” Dan asked quietly.

“Probably about .5.”

He sucked air. Even odds were not so good when you had only four missiles. They could look, shoot, look, shoot, but at a closing rate of fifteen thousand miles an hour they'd have no time for a second try. “Can we fire two-round salvos?”

“Depends on the geometry.” Noblos's grin was diabolical, until he grabbed a napkin and sneezed.

Nobody else said anything, and after a moment Dan nodded to Wenck. “Okay, Donnie, you're coming in at this pretty much from the outside. What're you seeing that we've all missed?”

The newly minted chief had been riffing on his keyboard all through the discussion. Now he rotated it to display a chart of the eastern Med. A sea-tinted teardrop faced its blunt end toward Damascus. The tapered tail extended far to the west, almost to Greece. He drawled, “A little different take on what Mr. Mills just presented. This blue patch is our defended area, against a missile from western Iraq.” He pivoted the screen so all could see in turn.

“According to that, most of the area we can defend is behind us,” Dan said.

“Right, but there's nothing we can do about that. It's just the way the intercept geometry works. Actually our optimal location would be about a hundred miles inland. But it means two things. First, we have a real narrow footprint we can launch from, to have much chance of making an intercept. Second, we've got to push that footprint in as close to shore as possible. The closer in, the better we can cover our defended area. However, we have to stay fairly far north, too. Unfortunately—”

“That puts us very close to Syrian waters,” Staurulakis finished.

Wenck nodded. “Yes ma'am. The closer inshore we get, the bigger the hoop on that basket we're trying to hit. But you're right.”

The operations officer murmured, “The Syrians are trying to figure out which way to jump in this war anyway. We probably don't want to be their excuse to jump the wrong way.”

“Hey, if they do, we'll just lick their shit too,” Wenck put in.

Dan winced—it was an unfortunate choice of words—and glanced at him. “Donnie, that's good. Clarifies the problem. Anything else? Any way we can make things easier for our tracking team? Give them some kind of advantage?” He made sure not to look at Terranova as he said this.

Wenck blinked and pushed his cowlick back. “Hey, everybody seems to think there's a bunch of dummies on that console. It's not Beth's fault. This is a new system. New software. But the training package is all old shit; all she got was the beta development notes. Wanna know why? Some dickhead in the missile-development agency cut their funds off. They need billions for some supersmart kinetic-energy warhead, so they cut all the funding for training. The Terror here, she had to make half of it up herself.”

Noblos started to object, spluttering; Dan held up a palm. “Okay, okay! Maybe a little less finger-pointing and more listening here? We have a lot of constraints and not much wiggle room. Two things worry me, and they're related. What Cheryl pointed out—Syria considers the area where we'd most like to be, to successfully intercept, as its territorial waters. Allied to that is ship self-defense. Petty Officer Terranova told me, but it didn't really hit home until today, how vulnerable we are in BMD mode.”

Mills said, “We're really almost blind against other threats.”

Dan nodded. “Right; such as antiship missiles fired from Syria. Or by Hamas or Hezbollah, from Lebanon. Intel says they might have some Iranian C-802s.”

Staurulakis murmured, “C-band search radar. Seventy-five-mile range. Sea skimmer; possible midcourse correction via data link; radar terminal homing.”

Dan said, “Mount one of those on a truck, and that could be a real headache, if we're not looking right at southeast Beirut when they launch. We need to be ready to either jam it, decoy it, or shoot it down.”

Wenck looked up with that dreamy stare he got sometimes. “What?” Dan asked him.

“If it's got a data link, maybe we could convince it it's off course. Send it someplace we aren't.”

“Spoof it? Good, look into that. And we haven't even mentioned the problem with the Patriot battery at Ben Gurion.”

“Plus there's Israel's own ABM system,” Noblos said.

“Right … Arrow. If both Aegis and Patriot lock onto an incoming missile, and Arrow, too, we could all jam each other up good.” Dan told the table at large, “I've kicked that one up to the commodore, but we still don't have any coordination with the Israel Defense Forces.”

A sharp double rap; they all looked toward the door. “Come in,” Dan called. It opened on the chief radioman, carrying a clipboard. He grinned uncomfortably. “Just a sec,” Dan said. “I want to finish my train of thought here.”

“Captain, this is the message you wanted.”

Dan frowned; what message had he “wanted”? Unless it was a personal from Blair. But he'd cut off e-mail to the crew; he could hardly stay in contact himself. Unless something had happened at home. “Just a sec,” he muttered. Then went on, turning back to their expectant expressions. “So, serious challenges. I want us to concentrate on those two things. One, how do we defend ourselves while Aegis is focused on looking inland—Matt, Cheryl, see what the two of you can work out. Two, how do we minimize interference with the Israelis, both Patriot and Arrow. Donnie, you and Bill work that issue.”

“Freq-hop at the lower end of their spectrum, maybe,” the chief said.

“Look into it. I need a recommendation. Petty Officer Terranova, brief me on your watch setup and any way we can destress your watchstanders. We could be out here awhile. I want them to be able to sleep. They've got to be fresh when they're in front of that screen. The rest of the ship's here to support them, so I don't want them pulled off for any other duties.” He started to slap the table, but caught himself.

Noblos rose first and made for the door. The comm chief brushed past him and came toward Dan, holding out the clipboard. “The message you were looking for, sir,” he said again, not meeting Dan's eye. “Sent late yesterday. Marked routine. So it didn't actually come in until just now.”

Dan ran his eye down the headers, to the text.

PARA 2 (C): WH STAFFER ADAM ALONSO AMMERMANN ENRTE USS SAVO ISLAND. PURPOSE: SHIP VISIT AND LIAISON WITH CTG 161 IRO CURRENT OPERATIONS. NO HONORS. SAVO ISLAND PROVIDE BERTHING/MESSING 0-7 EQUIVALENT.

He lifted the Hydra to his mouth. “Chief Toan, CO here. —Hey, Matt, can you stand by a second?”

“Sure, sir.” Mills halted by the door.

“CMA here, sir. Over.”

“Mr. Ammermann. In the in-port commander's stateroom?”

“Yes sir. With one of my boys on the door. Just like you said.”

“Okay, good. Tell him—tell Mr. Ammermann his clearance message came through. Take the guard off, and tell him he's welcome in the wardroom for evening meal. But we're going to have to talk about access, and so on.”

He remembered more now about Public Liaison. They'd been mainly young campaign workers, or sons or daughters of major donors and political confidants. After a short orientation, the White House chief of staff, or at least someone in that office, sent them out to embed in various federal agencies. They weren't actually appointees, since they weren't subject to the confirmation process. He wasn't even sure they were paid. You could see them as sort of political commissars, but that might be taking them more seriously than they warranted.

*   *   *

Minutes later he was in the unit commander's suite pouring coffee for Ammermann, who'd taken off his tie and was half-reclining on the settee reading the message. When he looked up Dan said, “Apparently somebody made an error, sent it routine. and it got delayed en route. That happens sometimes, when there's a lot of traffic. I apologize.”

“A lot of message traffic? Why's that?”

Dan started to explain, then hesitated. Could he really not know? And if he didn't … “Look, that says you're on your way, but it doesn't give me a clearance level. And we're … pretty busy right now, meeting our operational commitments. What exactly is it I can do for you, Jars?”